Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Three men in suits. She hadn’t bothered changing. Her sweatpants had two small holes in the left knee and an avocado stain on the right thigh. She hadn’t showered in three days. Margaret wondered if she smelled.

  Murray forced a smile, his old, wrinkled face cracking like a windshield hit by a brick.

  “Hello, Margaret,” he said. “You look like a bag of assholes.”

  The man’s penchant for pleasantries hadn’t changed.

  “And you look like an ad for a convalescent home,” Margaret said. “Isn’t there a mandatory retirement age in government work?”

  Another smile, this one genuine. “I wish I could retire. My wrinkled old ass should be in a fishing boat in Florida, catching redfish and croakers.” The smile faded. “Not everybody gets that choice.”

  Margaret felt a wave of guilt. Murray Longworth was over seventy, possibly even seventy-five. He worked ridiculous hours for a department that barely existed on paper, a department tasked with anticipating and defeating the country’s next biological nightmare. He was right: he should be retired, and yet he served every day while she sat on her behind and hid from the world.

  She crossed her left leg over her right, a move that would have looked professional had she been wearing a dress.

  “Murray, what do you want?”

  He pulled a page-sized, brown envelope from inside his jacket.

  “Nothing I’m about to tell you leaves this room,” he said. “Yesterday, there was an incident involving the Los Angeles, a nuclear attack submarine that was part of Operation Wolf Head.”

  Operation Wolf Head. The task force assigned the duty of finding and recovering any wreckage from the alien construct that had crashed into Lake Michigan five years earlier. That construct had come to be known as “the Orbital” because, when discovered, it had been in a low, geostationary orbit that defied the accepted laws of physics.

  Margaret had known about the task force, as did most of the public. The government couldn’t hide the fact that they’d moved warships onto the Great Lakes. But she hadn’t known a nuclear sub was involved.

  Neither, apparently, had Clarence.

  “I thought the Los Angeles had been scrapped,” he said. “And how could you get it through the Saint Lawrence Seaway without being seen?” He sounded annoyed, maybe even a little humiliated at being left out of the big-boy loop: Mister Super-Agent wasn’t privy to all the secrets, it seemed, and that fact burned.

  Murray tapped the edge of the envelope against his cane. “We converted her into a search vehicle assigned with scouring the bottom. Slipped her through the Saint Lawrence with a fake superstructure that hid the sail and outline. Looked like just another tanker. What matters is that for five years, the crew of the Los Angeles found nothing of note. Six days ago the sub’s commander reported a significant discovery. Two days ago, the flotilla lost contact with the sub. Last night, the Los Angeles fired torpedoes at — and sank — the guided missile destroyer Forrest Sherman and the Coast Guard cutter Stratton.”

  Clarence sat forward. “Sank? Heavy casualties?”

  Murray nodded. “Two hundred and forty-four crew from the Sherman are dead. Fifty-seven from the Stratton. Seven more from the Truxtun, another destroyer, which was hit but remains afloat. We’re assuming the entire crew of the Los Angeles perished — that’s another hundred and twenty. In total, four hundred and twenty-eight dead or lost and presumed dead. Considering the number of wounded, we’re still adding to the list.”

  Clarence sagged back into the couch.

  Margaret suddenly wanted to go back upstairs and sit down at her computer. She could look at the blogs and read the comments, see if people were still talking about her — anything was better than hearing this.

  Murray kept tapping the envelope against his cane, a rat-tat-tat beat that paced his words. “A third destroyer, the Pinckney, took out the Los Angeles. The Truxtun remains afloat, although it can’t do much. Right now the survivors of the sunken ships are all on board the Pinckney and on the Carl Brashear, a naval cargo ship converted for Orbital-related research.”

  Clarence’s face wrinkled in indignation. “You didn’t evac the wounded to mainland hospitals? That’s not—”

  Margaret’s left hand found Clarence’s knee. An automatic gesture, a way for her to tell her man relax, even though he apparently wasn’t her man anymore.

  “The wounded can’t leave,” she told him. “No one there can.”

  Clarence blinked, then he got it. Any of those survivors — wounded or not — could be infected. He turned back to Murray.

  “The media,” Clarence said. “What’s the cover story? How do you explain the battle?”

  “We don’t,” Murray said. “The flotilla was in the upper middle part of Lake Michigan. The shore was twenty-five miles away to both the east and west, a hundred to the north and two hundred to the south. Nobody on land saw a thing. The battle occurred in a no-fly zone, so there was zero civilian air traffic. The sailors themselves won’t be leaking the story, because right now no one leaves the task force — for the rather obvious reason that somehow escaped you.”

  Hundreds dead, just like that. A U.S. ship sinking other U.S. ships; Margaret knew the infection could make that happen, could take over a host’s brain and make him do horrible things.

  “Cellulose tests,” she said. “Any positives?”

  She had to ask, even though she didn’t want to know the answer. Inside a host’s body, the infection built organic scaffolding and structures from cellulose, a substance produced by plants that was not found in the human body anywhere outside of the digestive tract. She and Amos had invented a cellulose test so accurate it left almost no doubt: if victims produced a positive result, it was already too late to save them.

  “Two,” Murray said. “Both from corpses.”

  Positive tests. Just the thought of it made Margaret sick.

  The infection was back.

  Murray offered Margaret the envelope.

  She reached for it, an automatic movement, then she pulled her hand back.

  “You don’t want me,” she said, her voice small and weak. “I… this is all horrible, but I put in my time. I can’t go through this again.”

  Murray’s lip curled up ever so slightly, a snarling old man who wasn’t used to hearing the word no.

  “Worst loss of life in a naval engagement since Vietnam, and it happened right here at home,” he said. “Three ships destroyed, one damaged, about three billion dollars’ worth of military assets gone, and we have no idea what really happened. So pardon my indelicate way of speaking my mind, Montoya, but look at the motherfucking pictures!”

  He was going to yell at her? Like she was some intern who would jump at his every word?

  “Get Frank Cheng to look at them,” she snapped. “He’s your fair-haired boy.”

  Murray nodded. “So you know Cheng’s the lead scientist. I see you haven’t completely tuned out.”

  She huffed. “It’s not like Cheng makes it hard. He probably has reporters on speed dial so he can make sure his name gets out there. Send him to your task force. He might even bring along a camera crew.”

  Murray’s eyes closed in exasperation. Cheng’s desire to be recognized as a genius clearly rubbed the director the wrong way.

  Clarence reached out and took the envelope. Murray slowly sat back — even that minor motion seemed to cause him pain — and stared at Margaret. His fingertips played with the brass double helix atop his cane.

  “Operation Wolf Head’s primary research facility is on Black Manitou Island, in Lake Superior,” he said. “That’s where Cheng is. He made the case that he should stay there to provide continuity for the entire process, as opposed to being the first person to examine the bodies.”

  Margaret couldn’t hold back a smirk. She should have known Cheng’s desire to be quoted stopped at the edge of any actual danger.

  “What a surprise,” she said. “I guess you get what you pay for, Murray.”r />
  The old man’s wrinkled hands tightened on the cane.

  “I wanted to pay you,” he said. “You said no. But that doesn’t matter now, because I’m not the one asking this time — I’m here on direct orders from President Blackmon. She wants you on-site, immediately.”

  That numb feeling returned. For the second time in Margaret’s life, a sitting president of the United States had asked for her. By name. She’d answered that call once, for Gutierrez; look where that had gotten her, gotten him, gotten everyone.

  She heard a rattle of paper. She looked to her left: Clarence had taken the photos out of the slim envelope. He’d looked at them and was now offering them to her.

  Margaret still didn’t take them. She knew what would happen if she did.

  “Printed pictures, Murray?” she said. “With your black budget you can’t afford a fancy tablet or something?”

  “Nothing electronic,” Murray said. “Not out here, anyway. It’s a lot harder to make paper go viral.”

  She thought it odd to hear someone that old use a term like go viral. Most people Murray’s age barely understood what the Internet was.

  Clarence put the pictures in her lap. She looked down, an instant reaction, saw the one on top, and couldn’t look away.

  It was a photo of a drawing: a man sitting in a corner, covered in some kind of bulky blanket. No, not one man… two… maybe even three. There was only one head, but sticking out from the blanket she saw four hands.

  The original drawing looked water stained. Whoever had drawn it had done so quickly, yet there was no mistaking the artist’s skill — the subject’s open eyes looked lifeless, stared out into nothing.

  Why were the men hidden under the blanket? No, it wasn’t a blanket at all… it was a membrane of some kind, wrapped around dead bodies, parts of it attached to the wall, to the floor. It wasn’t an impressionist’s take; the artist had seen this, or at least thought he’d seen it.

  “Murray, what the hell is this?”

  “One of the bodies we recovered from the Los Angeles had that on her person,” he said. “The artwork is good enough that we were able to confirm visual ID — the subject of the drawing is Ensign Paul Duchovny, who served onboard the sub. Obviously there are others in there with him, but since we can’t see their faces we can’t identify them.”

  “Did you send divers into the sub?”

  “No one has gone near it,” Murray said. “The sub is off-limits until we get our analysis team set up. It’s nine hundred feet deep, so people can’t go down without specialized equipment. On top of that, there’s a radiation leak. We don’t even know if it’s safe to enter the wreck. Right now all our intel is coming from UUVs.”

  Margaret looked up. “UUVs?”

  Clarence answered. “Unmanned underwater vehicles. Sometimes autonomous, like a robot, but most of the time they’re controlled from a person on a surface ship.”

  Margaret again looked down at the picture. “Who drew this?”

  “Lieutenant Candice Walker,” Murray said. “She escaped the sub, made it to the surface. Unfortunately, she died before divers could get her to medical attention. She was just as crazy as Dawsey — cut off her own arm with a reciprocal saw just below the right elbow. She used her belt for a tourniquet and cauterized the wound, but it wasn’t enough. She escaped the sub by wearing an SEIE suit, a bulky thing that lets submariners rise up without suffering pressure effects. We think her tourniquet came off when she was exiting the sub, or maybe while she ascended. Since she was in the suit, she had no way of tying the belt off again. Her picture is next.”

  Margaret flipped to the next page, then hissed in a breath. A dead girl wearing battered, blood-streaked dark-blue coveralls. A lieutenant in the navy, based on her insignia — a highly trained adult, although her face looked all of eighteen. The girl’s right arm was a horrid sight: seared flesh and protruding, blackened bone. Extensive blood loss made her skin extremely pale. She had a bruise under her right eye and a long cut on her left temple.

  Margaret thought of the first time she met Perry Dawsey.

  He had been a walking nightmare. A massive, naked man, covered in third-degree burns from a fire that had also melted away his hair, leaving his scalp covered with fresh, swelling blisters. His own blood had baked flaky-dry on his skin. A softball-sized pustule on his left collarbone streamed black rot down his wide chest. His knee had been shredded by a bullet fired from the gun of Dew Phillips. And worst of all — even more disturbing than the fact that Perry clutched his own severed penis in a tight fist — the look on his face, those lips caught between a smile and a scream, curled back to show well-cared-for teeth that reflected the winter sun in a wet-white blaze.

  Perry, mangled almost beyond recognition. This girl — correction, this naval officer — much the same.

  Margaret shuddered, imagining a saw-toothed blade as a buzzing blur, jagged points scraping free a shred of skin or a curl of bone with each pass…

  “Did the autopsy confirm she died from blood loss?”

  Murray frowned. “You’ve been out of the game longer than I thought, Doc. We didn’t do an autopsy yet. The Los Angeles had a mission to recover pieces of the Orbital. You remember the Orbital, right? The thing that made the most infectious disease we’ve ever seen, a disease that turned people into psychopaths? The thing that made little monsters that tried to open a goddamn gate to another goddamn world? The thing that forced us to nuke the Motor City to stop that gate from opening?”

  Margaret felt her own lip curl into a sneer. “Yes, Murray, I so need you to fucking remind me about the fucking Orbital.”

  She felt a hand on her arm. Clarence, quietly telling her to ease down.

  Murray leaned forward. He spoke quietly, trying to control his rage. “Apparently, you do need a reminder,” he said. “Before Lieutenant Walker died, she admitted to sabotaging the engine room of the Los Angeles. She also admitted to shooting and killing two men. Her corpse and the second body, that of Petty Officer Charles Petrovsky, are in a Biosafety Level Four facility inside the Carl Brashear. They are infected with the same goddamn disease that could have wiped us all out five years ago, that made the crew of the Los Angeles fire on U.S. ships. So no, genius, we haven’t done an autopsy yet. For that, we need the best. We need you.”

  Margaret cleared her throat. She’d asked a stupid question and been properly slapped down for it. “You said the Los Angeles found something?”

  “Look at the last photo.”

  It was a photo of an object she didn’t recognize, some kind of beat-up cylinder sitting on the gray, lifeless lake bottom. The diver or photographer had rested a ruler close by: the cylinder was about five inches long, two and a half inches wide. It was frayed in places, as if it were woven from a synthetic material; like fiberglass, maybe. Detritus and some kind of mold had taken root within the fibers, making the object look fuzzy, almost alive.

  “This is from the Orbital?”

  “Maybe,” Murray said. “An unmanned probe discovered it six days ago. Five days ago, it was brought onboard the Los Angeles using the most rigorous decontamination and BSL-4 procedures known to man.”

  Clarence took the photo. “Not rigorous enough, apparently.”

  Murray nodded. “Three days ago, the Los Angeles’s commanding officer reported problematic behavior among the crew. We’re sure that was the beginning of the infection incident.”

  Margaret could only imagine how horrible that must have been. A submarine, hundreds of feet below the surface… those people had been trapped in there, nowhere to run.

  Clarence handed her back the photo. She stared at it, amazed that she was probably looking at an actual piece of alien hardware. The most significant discovery in human history — a discovery that had already delivered death and promised much more of the same.

  “This object,” Margaret said, “is it now onboard the Carl Brashear?”

  Murray shook his head. “It remains in the Los Angeles. The sub w
as struck amidships. The object was in the forward compartment, near the bow. That area appears to be flooded, but otherwise intact. We’re still dealing with fallout from the battle. Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll figure out how to go down and get it out.”

  They were going to bring it up. Of course they were.

  “Nuke it,” she said. It shocked her to hear those words come out of her mouth, but it was the only way to be sure. Massive ecological damage was a small price to pay for ending the threat. “Do it now. Today, Murray, before it gets out.”

  Clarence cleared his throat, a tic of his when he was about to politely contradict her.

  “Margo, that’s a big step,” he said. “The biggest. And it’s not like we have a nuclear torpedo — they’d have to figure out how to deliver a nuke and put it right on the money.”

  Her eyes never leaving Longworth’s.

  “They don’t have to deliver it because it’s already there,” she said. “Right, Murray? There’s a nuke onboard the Los Angeles? Probably about five megatons, enough to completely sterilize everything in a hundred-yard radius?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up in a small, wry grin; the master was proud of his pupil. He rubbed his jaw, looked off. Margaret sensed that he had already suggested nuking the site, maybe suggested it to the president herself, and he’d been overruled.

  “Destroying it isn’t an option,” Murray said. “If we grab it now, at least we have a chance at containment.”

  He was a puppet speaking the words of his controllers.

  “This isn’t about containment,” Margaret said. “The military wants it. They want to see if we can get some genuine alien technology. Great choice on the risk-benefit analysis, Murray.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Spare me a lecture, Doc. It’s not my choice. I’ve got my orders. We need to know how that object affected the crew — is this the same thing we saw before or a new phase in the disease’s development? Finding that answer could literally save the world.”